I know you no longer log meals (or, I'm pretty sure you don't), but is logging something you would recommend for someone who, diet-wise, feels pretty out-of-control and, health/fitness-wise is a pretty long way from where they want to be? Was it helpful for you at first, or do you think it was a bad-idea from the get-go?
No meal-logging site would be such a terrible idea if it was ONLY nutritional analysis. But every site I’ve been to, tends to contain these insidious little extras.
Most calorie counting sites WILL initially recommend that you eat 1200-1400 calories a day to lose weight, if you are female. This is horrifying. That level of calorie restriction is viewed by the body as starvation (unless you are a 4’10”, sedentary, 80-year-old woman). Eating in this manner to lose weight is a short-term, blind weight loss method. I say “blind weight loss” because you will, in fact, lose weight. However, your body will be in such a deficit that instead of a steady fat burn/promotion of energy levels to get you moving and preserve your beneficial lean tissue, it will indiscriminately offload body mass that it can no longer sustain - fat, water, muscle tissue (that includes your heart), bone tissue, and organ tissue (that includes your brain). After a relatively short period of time on this type of intake, the body starts cutting down on “unnecessary” calorie expenditure so you don’t die during “the famine”, so your energy levels drop, your resting calorie burn drops. Literally the amount of calories you burn doing nothing at all, starts to decrease quickly simply because you aren’t eating enough for your body to be willing to actually use calories. And the kicker? That kind of weight loss (thankfully) is not maintainable. Restriction does nothing for your fitness, health, or long-term sustainable weight loss. The reality is that even a person “at a healthy weight” can not maintain their basic health and fitness on 1200-1400 calories. But all logging sites will probably recommend exactly this to you. Before you enter any logging site at all, please be prepared to mentally combat that awful, dangerous part of “weight loss science”.
The other shitty thing about logging sites is that they tend to assign a “grade” to your food. It’s bullshit. Any site that grades Diet Coke an A (because it’s low in fat and sugar, hooray!!) but grades fresh avocado a C- (because it’s SO high in EVIL EVIL FAT, boooo) is just ridiculous. What a great and imaginative way to give people orthorexia and food fear.
However, meal logging can be very educational for someone who has no real perspective on what they eat, how they eat, what nutritional planning looks like, and how to get the nutrition they need. My main advice to you is to consider it at a short-term educational experience. It’s a scary road when you allow yourself to get dependent on food logging to “keep you on track”. Consider the idea of using food logging to learn portions, and then learn to eyeball the portions instead of weighing or measuring every single thing that goes into your mouth. Food logging can be a helpful, positive experience. It can also be a bottomless pit that takes all the joy out of eating and turns an “iffy” relationship with food into a straight-up eating disorder.
Don’t let your food become numbers.